Pro-Khalistan elements in Canada took their anti-India provocation up a notch on Sunday as a float featuring an effigy of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in chains and in a cage was prominently displayed at a Khalsa Day parade in the Greater Toronto Area or GTA.
The Khalsa Day parade was held in Malton, a town in the GTA, and accompanied with participants holding Khalistan pennants, shouting separatist slogans.
The display was promoted by the secessionist group Sikhs for Justice or SFJ, which linked it to the comment by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Saturday that Canada was “a rule-of-law country with a strong and independent justice system, as well as a fundamental commitment to protecting all its citizens.”
Trudeau had made those remarks after three Indian nationals were arrested on Friday in connection with the killing of pro-Khalistan figure, and SFJ’s principal organiser in British Columbia, Hardeep Singh Nijjar on June 18 last year in Surrey.
The Vaisakhi parade came a week after Trudeau addressed another such celebration in Toronto last Sunday, among pro-Khalistan slogans and anti-India slogans and signage.
SFJ also said it will convene a ‘Citizens Court of Canada” in Vancouver on June 18, the first anniversary of Nijjar’s death, on the “charges of ordering, abetting, conspiring and facilitating the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar.”
SFJ’s general counsel Gurpatwant Pannun described it was “duel” between Trudeau’s Canada and Modi’s India which it said was “accused by Canada and the US for violent transnational repression of pro Khalistan Sikhs.”
Last year, on June 4, a float featuring the assassination of late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was part of a shaheedi diwas or martyrdom day event in Brampton, in the GTA, marking the 39th anniversary of Operation Bluestar. When Indian forces stormed the Golden Temple in Amritsar on that day in 1984 to flush out separatist leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and his supporters. Other tableaux at the event had featured posters of Bhindranwale. Indira Gandhi was assassinated by two members of her security detail on October 31 that year.
